The print news coverage of the Michael Harvey trial continues to skirt important questions:

Why did the Fulton County (Atlanta) D.A.’s office fail to act for at least three years once DNA evidence linked Harvey to the brutal 1994 murder of Valerie Payton? According to news reports, they identified Harvey’s DNA in 2005 and arrested him in 2008.

And why didn’t the G.B.I. make the link between the Harvey’s DNA and Valerie Payton’s rape kit back in 2002 or 2003, at the latest, when they were supposed to have entered his sample into the state database for which they’re responsible?

Meanwhile the AJC’s coverage is even more confusing today than it was a few days ago:

Harvey was released from the Georgia prison system in 2007 after serving two years on an aggravated assault conviction. He also was imprisoned four other times since 1980 for crimes such as aggravated assault with intent to rape, burglary and car theft. Police arrested him in 2008 in connection with Payton’s death. His DNA was linked to the crime in 2005, the Fulton District Attorney’s Office said Monday.

OK, don’t ask the D.A. to explain himself about the three-year gap between the DNA match and the murder charges.

But do explain this: how could Harvey have been in the “Georgia prison system” in 2007 when that isn’t recorded in the Georgia Bureau of Corrections database? The database reports a different record, and they, at least, unlike Fulton County, keep coherent records and behave as if the people who are paying their salaries have a right to know what they are doing:

STATE OF GEORGIA – INCARCERATION HISTORY

INCARCERATION BEGIN

INCARCERATION END

02/04/2003

06/14/2003

05/12/1998

09/16/1999

02/04/1985

11/01/1985

10/23/1980

11/02/1984

Maybe Harvey was in the county jail. But that is Fulton County jail, not the “Georgia prison system.” The paper seems to be saying (without saying too clearly) that there are these other aggravated assault charges for which he was imprisoned in 2007 (for how long is also unclear). But he never got sent up to the state system for them. So, at most, that must have been a sentence of a year or less, which would have placed Harvey in a courtroom in Fulton County after his DNA was linked to a heinous murder, and the D.A. should have known about the match. Yet that evidence wasn’t, apparently, even brought up in court, or else (one must hope) he wouldn’t have been released in 2007, right?

Also, wouldn’t recidivism sentencing have kicked in by then, murder charges (so bizarrely) notwithstanding? We do have laws about getting popped for several violent offenses in a row, and they should have applied to Harvey, with his prior kidnapping conviction (His attempted rape conviction presents an interesting quandary: rape counts, but does attempted rape? It should: why reward failure to complete the crime?). So in addition to all the other apparently squandered chances to do something about Harvey’s ties to a murder, was the 2007 aggravated assault yet another situation in which some Fulton County Judge didn’t bother to enforce Georgia’s laws? Is it another situation in which Fulton County’s D.A. utterly failed to bother to investigate the criminal history of the defendant and ask the judge for appropriate sentencing?

Why did yet another person with a long history of serious violent and felony property crime (not to mention a DNA link in a bloody murder) stroll into court some time between 2003 and 2007 for another violent crime and get sentenced, apparently, to some brief stint in county jail, if that is indeed what happened? Where is the curiosity about any of this? It’s pretty clear it happens every day.

How overwhelmed is Fulton’s criminal justice system? Who is responsible for taking three years to get around to charging Michael Harvey with murder after the belated DNA match, for this?

Payton had over 50 carvings on her body when she was found, and a photo of her 8-year-old son was placed on her stomach, Ross said during opening arguments. Handwritten on the back of the photo were the words, “I’M BACK ATLANTA, MR. X,” written in a block style with all capital letters, Ross said.

There seems to be an insinuation (again, not a very clear one) either in the AJC coverage or coming from the D.A. himself that the reason all of this unfolded so slowly is because Michael Harvey isn’t suspected in any of the other unsolved murders of prostitutes that were so thick on the ground in the 1990’s.

You know, that he was merely the suspect in one heinous murder.

Is the D.A.’s office so swamped (or distracted) that murders are taking decades to process while the murderers are left on the streets to commit more crimes? For, in reality, Harvey’s DNA should have been taken and compared to outstanding rape-and-murder kits back in 1996, when he was convicted for rape, or in 1999, before he was released, or right away in 2002, when he was re-incarcerated. There were the beginnings of a good DNA database before 1999, and the first people who were entered into it were people with sex offense convictions, like Harvey. By 1999, when he was released, that database should have been functional enough to check at least the outstanding rape/murder cases in the state, like Valerie Payton’s death, against the DNA of convicted sex criminals, if it mattered enough to anyone.

Which, apparently, it didn’t.

Or was Payton’s rape kit one of the many left stockpiled on a shelf somewhere in the Atlanta Police Department while Bill Campbell mouthpiece and Chief of Police Beverley Harvard, no friend of rape victims, jetted around the country picking up awards and running political interference for her boss, the soon-to-be convicted mayor?

Harvard presided distractedly over some of the most bloody years on Atlanta’s streets. Thanks to such official neglect, multiple opportunities to get sexual predators off the streets were simply squandered. Was the Valerie Payton murder another one? Was another raped and murdered mother just not important enough?

Or was it the GBI that screwed up? Were they the ones sitting on Valerie Payton’s rape kit? Michael Harvey’s DNA sample? You have to really wonder what’s going on, when the spokesperson for the agency is busy telling the public not to worry about all the sex offenders they’ve lost track of but can’t be bothered to explain whether or not his agency is responsible for delays in processing these DNA samples during the time that a murder suspect with a long record of violent crime was still in state custody.

If GBI spokesman John Bankhead or Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard ever came forward and said, Look, we just don’t have enough resources to even pay appropriate attention to murder cases, they would receive resounding support from the public. But instead, it seems that both men are refusing to explain what went wrong in this investigation. And they are enabled in flying under the radar by many things, including a Clerk of Court system that behaves as if the public is not entitled to know what’s going on in their courts.

A clever ninth grader could create a database system for sharing court outcomes with the public, using nothing more than his lunch money for implementation, but, sadly, there are no clever ninth graders working at the Clerk of Court’s office. So long as an uninformed public continues re-electing political cronies to the head offices of the Clerk (and the print media remains silent on that and other well-known, substandard practices), that situation will not change for Atlanta.

Why is there no political push for sunshine in the courts? Neighborhood advocates have worked to great effect with the police to make streets safer, but those efforts are ultimately wasted if similar scrutiny is not applied to the court system, which is directly responsible for repeatedly releasing both violent and property offenders.

This is why full disclosure and frank discussion of the criminal history of offenders like Michael Harvey is so important, and why it is so unsettling that the D.A. is not being forthcoming with that information. Here is a known alleged killer, and it seems that nobody acted with appropriate speed to restrain him. Two, or five, or eight years ago, it would have been far easier to try Harvey for this murder. Fourteen years ago, when he was tried for another rape and should have had his DNA tested, it would have been easier still.

Now, it seems like an afterthought. And everybody involved seems to be covering each others’ mistakes. This is justice on the cheap. We’ve all been accepting utter neglect of most criminal behavior for so long that it doesn’t even seem noteworthy that an accused killer has been walking the streets all this time, in plain view.

Again, I strongly suspect the likely cause is the delay in processing the rape kits, which again, is a nation wide scandal. But always under reported. And yes, there can be years of delay in processing the DNA samples. Getting the time stamps on ‘entry’ and ‘conclusion’ of the sample thru processing might be useful here, but I imagine that’s next to impossible w/o a court order or subpoena. And the AJC confused & confusing? SSDD. They don’t have enough people to even try to cover the news. Which is also part of the larger ‘systems’ problem too, BTW. Not enough focus on priorities and always ‘cutting corners’ for cost. But thanks for noticing. JP

I think it’s the rape kits, too. But on which end? The police in Atlanta failing to deliver them, or the GBI failing to follow through?

What worries me is this: now that people have clearly screwed up, it’s basically in everyone’s interest to cover up for everyone else within the system.

And that’s why it is so important to have an inquisitive media. I don’t think that the size of the newsroom staff is the problem here. There are still hundreds of employees basically turning out fewer and fewer original column inches all the time — and they didn’t start with all that many.

The problem is protecting access. Once a reporter publishes something that even slightly irritates an elected official, or anyone else in a position of power, that reporter loses his or her access to that source.

So in the interest of maintaining those relationships, reporters basically walk a very tight party line and don’t ask hard questions, in person or in print — until someone’s vulnerable, then everyone piles on. It’s a shame, and a pretty embarrassing tap dance, but it happens every day, and there’s no point in pretending it doesn’t.

This isn’t the case everywhere. There are papers in other cities with very good investigative reporting staffs. The AJC ain’t one of them, to say the least. I don’t think that has a thing to do with the quality of individual reporters, or even individual issues, from crime to education to politics — it’s the management opting out of real investigative reporting. The types of stories they used to do in the past just don’t get done anymore. And you can’t tell me that it’s so bloody hard to walk across the street and pick up some paperwork from the Justice Center — or write a story about how you can’t pick it up because no-one will give it to you.

Well I think the bottleneck could be in several places, and/or all of them at once. But the GBI Crime labs themselves are forever understaffed, which does make a difference, especially if you’re looking at months for even an ‘expedited’ sample. They desperately need much more rigorous scientific standardization too, but that’s another story.

But the news/access flow dynamic is well known. It’s also corrupt as hell once you get down to the particulars, or merely very inviting of same. And just one aspect of the overweening corruption of the entire industry.

And why is this? “The types of stories they used to do in the past just don’t get done anymore”. The news & reporting staff, ‘the boots on the ground’ have been cut dramatically, and the pages devoted to hard news has been as well. We could provide cites too. But suffice it to say unless & until a worker for Cox Enterprises is directly affected & impacted, AND said staffer is deemed ‘important’ enough? That’s when we might be getting some decent coverage of this vital issue, IMHO. And then perhaps only for a fortnight, if we’re lucky. Otherwise? They’re more interested in selling advertising space & doing inane lifestyle ‘living well’ stories that make their advertisers happy. Again, SSDD, JP